A Glass Eye
by milkmoth
Summary: A crow and a glass eye. Jill/Wesker; AU based partially on the original RE5 plotline. Life for Jill before and after Wesker froze her. COMPLETE.
1. beak doctor

_Nothing feels cold, not even his touch._

* * *

><p>AN: This is an AU based on RE5, inspired by parts of the earlier drafts from the game. It's basically a (dramatically) altered version of RE5 from Jill's point of view.

This story is _not _told completely chronologically. The pieces are skewed. Sometimes, it doesn't matter. Most of these are moments of Jill's captivity, some are clear flashbacks. Some are events that happen in a timeline, but those should be easy to place.

I'm going to put this into segments because the length was getting out of control. I plan to have it finished and posted in three parts within the next few months. Life might get crazy, but I have most of it written, so it should turn out all right.

Enough author's note from me. I'll shut up now, except to say that I always appreciate feedback!

* * *

><p><strong><em>A Glass Eye<em>**

_1: beak doctor_

* * *

><p>No words come out, but she gasps for breath and her vision turns white with the pain. There's blood on her hand, going cold and washing pink to clear in the hard rain. There's an even colder, harder fist pinning hers.<p>

Her body stings with little knives, butchering her until she's left with smiling bone.

* * *

><p>She realizes that she has been awake for a moment; she can still feel her cheek buzzing to life where someone's skin thumbed over the scars. Her mind can't move and sticks in funny places, like a tongue numbed on ice. Her thoughts run slow and confused, dirty as street slush (she can remember Raccoon, the snow turning the color of the asphalt-)<p>

For a moment, Jill wonders why Captain Wesker is stitching her up, and then she croaks out his name.

"Captain-"

She can block out the pain. Whatever it is, she can fight it.

"The drugs have addled you," he says, and she hears disapproval. He does not raise his head from his stitching. Her body is covered in cuts: half-naked, the ugliest thing she has ever seen. Dark, wiry threads burrowing into her body like parasites.

He tilts his head to her, and the stitching stops.

"What year is it?"

_1998. _

She realizes her blunder. She locks her jaw to Wesker – once her captain – and turns away. He grabs her by the chin and turns her back.

"Year."

"Two... two thousand... six," she manages. She's too weak to move any more. It's hard to fight what you can't see, she thinks.

He marks something else then takes another glance at her. But the glance becomes a look and the look becomes a stare.

When she stares back, she notices a pucker under his eye that his glasses can't hide. She notices, too, a twitch in the muscles around his mouth. He does not like her. But at the same time he looks at her with unadulterated greed and pleasure. Like something shiny he found in the sand.

"Like new," he says. Jill doesn't understand. Everything is foggy. He reaches out to touch her face, tracing where he stitched her. She feels nothing. His hands no longer feel cold,

"Are you familiar with mythology?" He doesn't use her name, or tenderness. He turns her head first this way and then that way. She half-expects him to open her mouth and examine her teeth. It's the mad doctor making chit-chat.

"Yes," she says. She struggles to remember. But she liked fairytales better. Back as a girl. _Even she used to like them. _Between hidden knees, scraped on tree bark, and dutiful piano lessons. She plays chopsticks in her head. It sounds more like a funeral march. She's not normally this distracted.

Or maybe having Wesker handle her like this is just too surreal for her to comprehend.

"Greco-Roman, I suppose."

Her mind runs groggy. All it can come up with, after a moment, is an answer.

"Yes."

"How trite. The Romans were oversexed and overindulged, their deities petty and human. Their gods as themselves – think on that for a moment." Her thoughts are far too clouded to be directed elsewhere. He goes on. "But I suppose I must use an analogy you must understand: you may as well have been born from my skull."

She turns the thought slowly in her mind. She is sure he means something by it, but she can't figure out what. The fog hangs thick, and she can't see for miles. Dead little stars dance in the edges of her vision. "Okay," she says, unsurely.

He snorts and turns back to his clipboard.

She struggles to sit up. When she does, she runs a hand over the scars in her arm. It closes up her throat to air because this mess – this chickenscratch – is _her body_.

"You will be perfectly recognizable," he says, when he catches her staring. "Back to your regular self." His voice has a sharp edge of irony. She can't say anything back. Her tongue feels like it's full of lacerations - not just her tongue, but the inside of her throat, too. It stings. She stares at her arm and not at him.A man in white scrubs – she hadn't realized they weren't alone - takes her arm and measures her pulse very quickly, then turns her arm over.

"She's not trashing this time – we must have got the right dose._" _He waits for the slow thump of her heartbeat. "It's amazing." Wesker says nothing in return. "I doubted that it would work – she had permanent nerve injury-"

For a moment Jill fears she won't ever breathe again.

"Yes," Wesker says, and it sounds very different from when she said it: sure and cruel and bored and dismissive. "I can see that for myself. Tend to something else."

The doctor puts his head down and slips away soundlessly as he came. Now Jill strains, and she can make out more sounds. _Nerve damage. _Her spine tingles. Probably she's just imagining it. It _is _difficult to sit up, but she won't sit down now. She won't give in. She doesn't consider how long she may have to sit up, only that she has to do it one second longer.

Fuck him.

_What game are you playing, Wesker? _she wants to say, but the invisible cuts in her tongue only make her choke. She realizes she's wet, and as her heart beats faster she grows colder and colder. The hospital gown – backless – is dry but thin as a whisper. When she moves, she can hear it rustle words unsaid.

He sighs, weary of her company.

After a while her bones are too heavy for her to hold up. Even her eyelids are too much. She closes them. She can still hear doctors bustling around her, but they grown fainter and fainter by the moment. When she feels cold hands on her she starts and almost screams. The pinch in her neck is confirmation of a needle.

Then he's touching the place roughly between her collarbones, and smiling in a way that she doesn't want to think about. The lighting is bright and fluorescent, but he's tipped his glasses enough that she can see something not-right in his face.

She reaches up, like an infant for a mobile. He lets her hand sway and ultimately falter.

"You have glass in your eye," she says.

He smacks her in the side of the face, and she can feel that, just barely, before she falls back. Closing her eyes feels good. If he's still looking at her, she doesn't notice. Doesn't _want _to notice. If you can't see bad things, they can't see you.

* * *

><p>Even she used to believe that she could avoid the monsters if she shut her eyes and pretended to be asleep.<p>

* * *

><p>When she wakes again, he cuts the wires out of her. She can't feel anything at all. She doesn't feel happy, or sad. She can't feel anything except a heart beating fast.<p>

She can hear every sound, suddenly, ever rustle of lab coat and every scrape of a scalpel against the table. She is so much of everything around her that she is nothing of herself.

He stands before her, but she can't focus her eyes long enough to register this. They loll around, distracted and conquered by every smallest thing. With some sadistic urgency, he takes her hand in his and guides it to her heart.

Nothing feels cold, not even his touch.

He has her attention. Suddenly her sympathetic nervous system kicks in – not just kicking, but kicking and screaming. She thrashes agains him. Screams out in hate. No one in the laboratory reacts. Is there anyone here?

She feels some raised machine, pumping.

"Not now, Jill."

She stops.

His fingers are involved, now, careful and excited, and she can feel them against her skin even if she cannot feel how cold they are. Her own heart beats faster, if only because she is afraid at what she grasps.

She does not look down, but she can feel metal there, ticking over the thump of her heart.

She can see him smiling, almost; the closest she has ever seen to a smile, at any rate, and her heart picks its pace up.

"P30," he says, "or at least, that's what they've started calling it around here. I don't think that you care to hear all the suffixes." His fingers grow bored and he pulls away. She's left with her fingers loose around it. She doesn't want to touch it, but it's attached to her. "Now be a good girl and stand up, Jill."

_Jill. _Her name. She almost forgot.

Without thinking, she stands.

Something in her means she can only focus when he speaks, and this makes him lean in and nearly smile.

_P30. _

What a simple name for a steel bridle.

* * *

><p>With the P30, she sees the world in a new way. Everything is sight and sound. Everything is saturated. It's difficult to focus.<p>

Except on him.

She walks three paces behind him, close enough to hear his every word. Close enough to intimidate. Occasionally the man with him - _Tricell CEO_, she reminds herself - will glance over his shoulder at her. He may even stroke his beard. He is a tall man, once large, she is sure; but aging. She thinks that if he pulls at his beard any longer it may fall out. From the small smirk on Wesker's face, she thinks that he might be thinking along similar lines. That or he has something more terrible up his sleeve.

He - Wesker - walks with his gloved hands clasped behind his back. She thinks about that old story - not sure if it's true or not - about gentlemen putting their valued guests at their right, to show that they're unarmed. That's what Wesker is doing. It's a farce, and he gleans pleasure from it.

She stands behind them, vision drenched in red. Her hands convulse, unseen under her robe, and she can't tell if it's the memory of the murders she committed or the side effects of the P30. It's nasty shit.

Like him.

She nearly stumbles over the foot of a secretary, standing just as attentively as she is. The secretary is olive-skinned and gray-eyed, with magazine hair and accessories. With a different expression on her face, she could be beautiful.

"So this has all happened under your administration?" The CEO speaks again, finally having had his fill of his surroundings. He turns to Wesker.

"Yes. I do hate to be arrogant, but I've made vast improvements in your staff's processes. Not to mention..."

He looks over at Jill. The CEO looks over as well. He does not look so much unsettled as curious. Jill has never felt so violated as she has felt in the past - how long has it been? She has no means of marking time, and the P30 skews everything.

"Yes," he says. "The subject you detailed in your report."

Jill feels her breath hitch as the needle stabs its dose - quick, easy, regular.

Wesker can hear her. She knows it like she knows her own heartbeat. "Yes," he says. "You may study her for yourself, if you'd like."

Jill can feel the smug secretary holding her breath next to her. She doesn't know why. She senses that the secretary is pleased by her, but also hates her. It seems to be a recurring feeling around the labs.

The CEO is surprisingly gentle as he removes her mask. He must figure he's playing with something delicate that belongs to Wesker, but he retains enough authority not to look in his subordinate's direction. Wesker, for his part, realizes that he is in control. His hands stay behind his back; his smirk plays on his face. Jill can only stare at him. Drenched in red, everything red.

With an equally gentle tug, the CEO pulls down her hood. He examines her.

"What do you think?"

Wesker almost sounds proud.

"A little pale," the CEO says, but she sees greed in his eyes. "And fatigued. Are you sure she's fit?"

"The P30 renders sleep unnecessary," Wesker dismisses, "But her body suffers for it. I personally ensure that she sleeps two hours each day, to keep her from becoming too reliant on the drug."

Jill doesn't know how she could become any more reliant than she is. Her two hours of sleep come via a needle.

"Hold out your arm," the CEO says. Jill does not.

"Jill," Wesker repeats, "hold out your arm."

Arm out, thin and strangely human amidst the folds of her cloak. She raises her head. It's a small effort, but she can catch her reflection in the cryogenics glass. She searches for the faces of the people inside, but they look nameless, somehow like fetuses. She mutes a shivers and studies her own appearance.

Who the fuck is that pale, skinny blonde?

The CEO traces her arm. Even he can't hide his awe. "Gone," he says, "and you told me she was scarred!"

"She was."

"I saw her myself, sir." It's the secretary, with her heavy Italian accent. "She was disgusting, _un __rotamme, _before Albert Wesker's work." Some more words flow in Italian. Jill feels that they are omitted for her benefit, because the Tricell CEO continues to stare at her, even more awed, while the smirk on Wesker's face only seems smugger than before.

"There are some traces," the CEO says, stroking his beard and grasping Jill's arm with his other hand, "but only the merest vestiges of cuts. They are only little white lines-" and he traces one on her arm "-What brilliant work!" He says something in Italian, and the secretary says something back. Jill wants to scream, but the P30 helps to keep it down her throat.

She catches Wesker's eyes. She knows from her reflection that the pale, skinny blonde has eyes like a fish's. He looks at her like she's something else.

* * *

><p>His face is still bleeding when he picks her up and lays her on the stainless-steel table. Her breath goes shallow and her brain goes somewhere else, to the light on the ceiling. The anesthesia takes care of the rest. When she malfunctions like this, it's always the same: he lifts her bridal style and takes her to a room where he cuts her up, like some violent parody of a wedding night. Sometimes, in frustration, he rips the metal off her chest and sparks fly.<p>

She's never been this fucking poetic.

It's the drugs.

They trap her in her own mind.

* * *

><p>The memories are the worst because she feels more alive in them than in other time.<p>

* * *

><p>Chris used to tease her about it. He used to smooth back her hair and ask her how women so pretty ended up spinsters. It would almost have been condescending, if his teasing hadn't been so familiar. She would always knock him in the ribs with an elbow, and he would wince and say <em>that's why. <em>

Also, she said, she had more important things to do.

But in that stark, claustrophobic little lab room, it's just her and Wesker and the beat of the P30.

All her purpose crumbles as Wesker stitches. She's embroidery.

She used to look at wedding dresses - just for fun, sometimes - and -

_You're destined to die alone, _those magazines had screamed at her. On those nights she was low on sleep, exhausted from training, with white-eyed dead walking behind her eyelids. She was heading into the store late for a bite to eat, alone_. _

_Alone. In a dark room with your heart pounding and your pants hot with piss. _

Jill almost believes them now.

* * *

><p>The bird sits on the wall and watches everything.<p>

One day, someone shot it down, and then it left its prey and its nest for this life on a man's wall. Its orange eyes, once pulsing, have been replaced. Here is what it would have seen if it still had eyes instead of red glass:

An old man, sitting at his desk.

A sycophantic secretary.

And two murderers.

The murder is quick and clean. Jill snaps his neck. There's no blood, except that doesn't really matter, because her vision is already saturated with it. She steps aside and lets him thud, wrinkled face down, onto his desk.

The secretary is stunned. "That is all?"

"That is all," Wesker says, and Excella stares at him in awe. He is already her god - what is greater than death? To murder, Excella thinks, is truly easy when you have enough strength. When you have wits and power and most of all, trust-

The beak doctor stares at the old man on the desk, wondering when she became this _thing. _His body doesn't startle her. She doesn't even feel sorry.

When she stares up at the wall, the bird stares back, and she fancies that it can see her. It gives her the creeps. Reminds her so much of something (_before_), back in the Spencer mansion. What is it with powerful men and dead animals?

Wesker looks at the CEO and smiles.

* * *

><p>A kick to the jaw – spit and blood and teeth spew out and his head cracks. There are still five, all in black. She does not think about the faces underneath. Time to run.<p>

So she does. Thud of boot to dry, hard ground, over and over, until she reaches the jeep. He sees her and starts it up, racing away from danger. The car's going thirty before she can stop and, her ribcage aching, she quickens her pace and leaps aboard. Each breath feels like dust and fire.

"Good," he sees, just beginning to relax, "Got 'em good this time. Ha! Those bozos wont' be getting Irving today."

She's starting to catch her breath. Her heart rate normalizes and she wants to close her eyes. Not to sleep, but just so everything will stop being so unbearably bright.

She notices him looking at her exposed boot. It has a heel. A feminine detail, almost. "What's with the mask? You need to keep your face covered or somethin'?"

She notices him swallow. But defiance and his due show in his eyes. He reaches a hand out to lift her mask but she snaps it before he can try.

He bellows in pain, his foot hitting the gas and the wheel turning crazy as he writhes and reaches out to hold his broken wrist with his other hand. The beak doctor steadies the wheel.

"Do your job," she says, and that is that.

_Do your job. _

It's the only way to live, she wants to tell him.

* * *

><p>Back in the office, Excella lounges in the CEO's old chair. Dark leather, the epitome of luxury. Above her head the bird looks at her sadly, as if to say, <em>don't you see me? <em>

Jill doesn't want to give this woman warnings. She stands with her hands a her sides as Irving speaks.

"She _broke_ it," he complains, "my gun hand. She fucking just _broke it. _I wasn't doin' nothing, and she goes and breaks my wrist. You better get her under control."

Excella looks strange in her chair. She's a tall, full woman, but she still looks oddly gilded in that dark chair. Out of place. Her lips purse like she's tasted something sour.

"She knows what she is doing, and she knows she will be punished for it. _You _on the other hand-" Excella turns her full gaze on Irving - "need to get your head back where it should be. No foolishness."

Irving looks aghast.

"No one appreciates me 'round here," he says under his breath. "One day I'll show you... I'll show you all-"

Excella snorts, then stands. "You are – how do you say it? _Dismissed."_

Irving leaves, glancing over his shoulder as he does. Jill moves to follow, but no sooner do her robes swish than Excella corrects her.

"No, no. With me."

Jill waits until Excella exits the door and follows at exactly three paces, her customary length.

It's an easy walk to the labs. A keypad in the elevator allows them access to the floor where Wesker putters. _Putters. _As though the world were to end in a garden. It opens and allows them access to the fluorescence, which is beginning to feel more like home to the pale beak doctor than does the sunlight.

This isn't the laboratory where he grew her, but it's close enough. Smaller, though, and less busy. Quiet. There are no assistants here. Excella strides toward his desk where he stiffens over his work.

"What is it?"

Jill can hear his nasal tone, his annoyance. If Excella is half as crazy about him as she pretends to be, then she must notice it too.

"The BSAA has noticed our little American friend," Excella drawls, jutting her hip out and placing a hand on it.

"Alas."

"And your _experiment_ has broken his hand."

Wesker gives Jill a cursory glance. "He can do his work without it."

_Do your job. _

Jill is glad she needs both her hands to kill.

Excella says nothing, but purses those full lips again. Her body tightens on itself: arms crossed, brow knit (there will be wrinkles, the beak doctor thinks, unless the injections continue).

Finally, she speaks, a murmur of Italian. So simple that even Jill can understand.

What she says is so ridiculous that Wesker laughs.

Jill does, too.

* * *

><p>She never liked him, she thinks, as she throws him against the wall.<p>

She can smell his sweat, rancid, lingering in the cloth under his armpits. His breath is wet and smells of halitosis covered with mint.

"Anything – anything you want – just – I won't -"

She wants to see him die.

_Not her_. The P30. And Wesker.

"You will," she says. She shoves the vial into his sweaty palm, and that is that. Another man dead.

She didn't like him, she tells herself. He crumples to the ground, pulling at his collar and breathing fast. He looks up at her, searching briefly for pity, but he knows he will find none. To him she is no more than an automaton. Someone's psychopomp.

She didn't like him.

* * *

><p>"I'll need it done in the next month. She knows too much for my taste."<p>

He talks so casually, like a hit is just a business deal. She closes her eyes so she doesn't have to stare up at those searing fluorescent lights. She wishes she could close her ears and pretend she was somewhere else, somewhere without machines beeping and Wesker droning.

"She'll not go down without a fight, if I know her at all."

Jill takes a deep breath. In through her nose. Out through her mouth. Her muscles ripple with longing, and she opens her eyes.

"Yes. Well. I do trust your ability." The person on the other end says something else. Wesker's voice goes lethally flat. "I thought we agreed that names were unnecessary to our little venture."

A scalpel glitters on the table. When she takes it, it feels sharp in the palm of her hand. On the phone, Wesker's voice goes sharp, too.

"You don't understand the delicacy of the situation. The woman is dangerous. She works with the Organization. Yes. _That _Organization, you fool. I-"

Jill's clumsy movements make the operating table fall, and the tubes in her seem to shriek when they split from her skin.

His cell phone clatters to the floor, smashing plastic, but she's surprised him, and he grunts and struggles against her. She brings the scalpel to the tendons in his neck, but he knocks her back into the wall with an elbow to her stomach. She's not finished. She roars and she jumps back on him again, like a cat. With a burst of energy, he pins her down.

His glasses, last of all, clatter to the floor.

He's breathing hard. She can feel his breath – warm, for once – on her face. His glasses have fallen off, and she can see his eyes – one false and pale blue, one true and red like a wound.

It's a small triumph.

It's all she could hope for.

He leans in and bares his teeth for her. Science has stripped their humanity.

"You try to attack me again-" he yanks the scalpel from her hand, where blood is pooling "-and I will slit your throat. You are nothing but an experiment to me, Jill. You are nothing but bait. Do you understand?"

_Yes. Yes. Do it. _This way she can go down fighting, the way she intended. She snorts. For a moment, she feels like Jill Valentine again, and not Sleeping Beauty filled with gears.

"If you wanted to kill me, you would've done it earlier."

She thinks of the thing (_before_), in the mansion, the one that was once a girl with a name and a family. Jill could be like her now. But she isn't.

He stands, pressing hard on her arm to raise himself. He reaches down to pick up his glasses first, giving her his back. She watches him wipe the dust off of them and put them back on. "You should count yourself lucky. You have something that I need."

She struggles against the drug, getting up to face him. "What?"

"You are my key to the new world." Her stomach churns. His smile now is perfectly monstrous. "It is your blood that has made my aim a reality." He stands again, picking up the shards of the tubes and glasses that were next to her bed. With a start, she realizes that some of the glass had red-and-white patterns emblazoned on them.

She feels sick. "You wanted –"

"Wanted to rebuild Umbrella? At one point."

"The P30-"

"Mine. Achieved with TriCell's resources. Not Umbrella's. But it was their research that made it possible." He stands. One hand is behind his back while the other, gloved, turns a shard around in the light. "If I had ideas of rebuilding Umbrella in my image, then rest assured, Jill, my plans have changed." He laughs, low in his throat. "That is why my former associate has become – too _dear _to live."

He lets the shard of glass drop with a clink. It breaks on impact.

"Remind me to program more frequent doses for you. It should curb this kind of behavior."

He calls in an attendant and walks out of the room. Jill feels the hard tile under her, the ungiving fluorescent over her. She can feel where he bruised her. She can feel where all the needles were stuck in, where all her muscles ache from all the treadmills he made her run.

She collapses.

* * *

><p>If only she knew what makes her special. If she can't change it, it's as good a reason as any to die.<p>

The next day, her dosage increases, and from then on she is docile. He even has a new costume for her, a morbid thing that makes her feel like death itself. A crow. She supposes that it's fitting: she'll be the one spreading the very virus she tried so hard to contain.

* * *

><p>The P30 and the fear clog her throat. This doesn't usually happen. She's been able to control herself. The fear is a trigger; it does horrible things to her-<p>

_Chris. _

Right there. It's him, isn't it? This isn't some game, this isn't some trick?

Oh, God. _Fucking God. _She thought she was over this. She thought she'd resigned herself.

She has, she tells herself, but she can't resign him. Her partner. Her survivor. A last beacon of right.

"_Run_," she rasps.

"Did you say something?"

Wesker sounds amused.

She can't speak.

Afterward she plays it back in her head, over and over, like an old VCR tape.

Chris. Talking to a woman in head scarves. They're meeting in some dingy old hovel. The woman gives him weapons. They talk. He leans in and gives her some scrap of paper. Together they study it, heads nearly touching.

"They're partners," Wesker says. She doesn't like it when he talks for her benefit. It usually aims to disarm her.

She replays it in her mind:

Chris. _Chris_. It's really Chris.

She catches her reflection in the dark part of the video screen. One shaking hand reaches up to touch the beak doctor's mask, in the place where Jill's cheek would be.

He knew Jill.

He can't see her like this.

* * *

><p>"<em>Some few persons even got a fragment of the looking-glass in their hearts, and this was very terrible, for their hearts became cold like a lump of ice."<em>

_- Hans Christen Anderson_


	2. mirror in her eye

_a/n: _I might edit this in a couple days, but I want it off my hands for now. If you want mood music, you can find a link to a playlist for this fic on my profile. Happy reading!

* * *

><p><em>He smiles, thin as a crescent, lips as pale.<em>

* * *

><p><em>What will you do now, little Gerda?<em>  
><em>Kay and the Snow Queen are one, they're a single<em>  
><em>pillar of ice, a throne of silence -<em>  
><em>and they love you<em>  
><em>the way the teeth of winter<em>  
><em>love the last red shred of November.<em>

_- Sandra M. Gilbert, "The Last Poem About the Snow Queen"_

* * *

><p><strong><em>A Glass Eye<em>**

_2: mirror in her eye_

* * *

><p>He holds her arms behind her back. She says nothing.<p>

If she says nothing, maybe he can't see her.

"Sheva!" Chris screams, but it is already too late for his partner. He drops the beak doctor. Bad idea. She thrashes against the drug. The order still stands, and she reaches out for Chris's leg, tripping him.

_Don't remember me_, she hopes against hope, _don't remember me like this._

His partner is pinned under a god, and he is squeezing at her neck. Her face goes redder, the color of clotted blood, but Jill sees her hand go to her belt. A knife the size of the woman's forearm – she thrusts it into Wesker's thigh. Jill sees him wince, but his hold gets stronger. The woman stabs again, and again, into his leg, his chest. His throat. Blood fountains; Wesker struggles and clenches harder. She has a strong arm, but eventually the knife clatters to the floor. She squirms away from him, but Jill knows there's no use. He gives a cat's smirk and Jill knows what will happen next to the mouse.

"SHEVA!" Chris screams again. His scream reverberates in Jill's ear drums. It hurts.

It hurts.

And then everything explodes.

* * *

><p>"You have no reason to be afraid."<p>

Jill takes deep breaths to try and calm herself. Her handgun lies flat in her lap, catching the moonlight through the trees. She looks up, but she can't see much of his face, especially with his sunglasses still on.

She can't laugh at that now.

"Afraid? Captain?"

His nostrils flare and his jaw tenses. The pain. She avoids looking at his arm. His voice is, somehow, miraculously even.

_Afraid_, she thinks, looking instead down into her lap. Is she afraid? For Chris and Barry? _Yes_. And something else: guilty.

She looks up again, and this time she catches him wincing as he peels his sleeve up. The sight is enough to make her wince, too: blood and pus and carnage, all glued to the fabric of his uniform.

She sucks in air, a hiss, and he looks up at her. "There is no reason to be afraid," he says again.

She's already leaning over. The van's bumpy - Vickers is driving fast, the coward, fast away from Chris and Barry - but that doesn't stop her. When the bumps in the road knock her off balance she contorts to avoid resting her hand on him. He doesn't move to help her.

"Let me take care of that for you."

"It can wait until we have adequate medical care."

She examines the wound and grimaces. "This can't wait." She's no medic - it's true - and the wound looks far out of her basic training. She thinks the captain must not like her, but- "At least let me bandage it."

They sit there for a minute. Finally, he holds out his arm.

She peels the sleeve all the way up and re-examines.

She has to repress a shudder. The moonlight makes the knife wound look even worse than she suspected, deep and black-red. She turns his arm over and feels him tense. She feels horrible for making him suffer.

Horrible and a little bit curious. It's _the captain._ Wesker.

"Does it hurt when I do that?"

"Moderately."

"Well," she says uncertainly, "at least you can feel it."

"I thought we agreed we would leave the prognosis to the professionals."

Jill laughs a little. It sounds kind, but it's misplaced kindness. "Right," she says, "I forgot. We're both special ops here. Not doctors."

He smiles, thin as a crescent, lips as pale.

The car bumps again as she removes the first aid kid from under the seat and unlatches it. It's weird. She expected him to feel different - cold or something. She rummages through the kit until she finds the antiseptic.

When her fingers make their way to the wound, her fingertips find warm blood. Black-red. It fascinates her.

He trembles under her touch.

_He must be faint. It's the pain. Or the blood. Or both._ It makes her heart trip in her chest.

She winds the bandage around and around until she can tie it off neatly, and then she draws back and they sit in silence. She shifts. It sounds like an avalanche. She wonders if he's sleeping behind those glasses. The poor guy. It's rare that she feels anything for the captain, but still. She wouldn't blame him, after getting knifed in the shoul-

"You did fine work."

"What?"

"Back there."

"What do you mean?"

He looks at her through those glasses. "You could have done something stupid. You didn't."

She speaks very softly, almost indignantly, but not quite. Not quite because she knows he's right.

"You think I would do that?" Abandon my own safety for my doomed partner's?

The realization is somber: Maybe I would.

"No."

"You sound sure about that," she says. Maybe it's just late, but she hates the idea that he knows her. He knows her, when she just felt him tremble.

"Of course I am. Jill, you're a S.T.A.R.S operative. One of my own. You have never been anything less."

Despite herself, she's touched. It's the only moment she's ever felt like the captain has acknowledged her. She settles back into her seat and thinks for a moment. There's only one suitable response:

"Thanks you, Wesker."

She lays her forehead against the window and listens to the sound of tires on the night road. She closes her eyes and tries to convince herself it's soothing and that there's not a knot in the pit of her stomach.

She was a good operative. She'd done everything right. Left the uncertainty of Barry and Chris for the certainty of Wesker and the van. She followed orders and adhered to the mission. _Never run a risk when you can run for your life,_ her old boss used to joke. He'd been a good guy. Different from Wesker. He had two sons, little kids.

She immediately thinks of Barry's family and feels bad again. Then Chris. Her partner. _I was responsible - I should have gotten him out alive._

She hopes they can find their way back without the van. She hopes nothing horrible is going to happen to them. She hopes they're okay. Whatever Wesker tells her, she is afraid. The psycho in the woods is still out there.

* * *

><p>She stares at him on the ground, a mess of gore. The woman got him good. The explosion was too close to him. Did he plan it? She can't remember. It's certainly backfired on him, now. His face looks pale and strained. For a moment, she thinks she might offer to bandage his wounds, but her mouth opens and the words come out short.<p>

Instead she kneels at his side, not-quite-touching him. She can't bear to. It can't be. It can't be.

It's not that she has any personal stake in the matter; it simply _can't be._

Her reaches out and tugs at her hood. "Carry me," he mutters, or at least that's what she thinks he says. It's hard to tell. It comes out as more of a cough. Blood splatters on the tile, pooling with the rest of it. So much god-blood, except gods don't bleed.

She slings him softly over her shoulder and drags him away, leaving an incongruous trail of red. He's so warm, warm all over, and Jill can't help but lean into him until she's covered with his blood. It soaks her cloak, making dark stains in the purple fabric. On her face, it streaks like vandalism. It bleeds into her own wounds, the wounds that make her vision crackle white.

In a lucid moment, she thinks how disgusting she is. Fucking vermin.

In the next, she doesn't care.

* * *

><p>At the facility, Jill clumsily wipes the blood off his hand and presses it to the sensor. Her ears still ring with the sounds of Chris's screams. With the boom of the explosion. His handprint goes through (<em>a miracle<em>) and she drives through the facility. Her hands on the wheel reassure her: _you have control._

She loses that illusion entirely when she enters the labs.

The attendants are speechless, unable to help him and, she suspects, unwilling. They stare at him like he is an impossibility. She knows the feeling well enough, but has no patience for it.

She strides to the elevator, up to a dark leather chair.

Excella's face curdles when Jill enters unannounced. She draws back, disgusted, when Jill has to support herself on the desk.

"Did he send you here?"

Jill does not know what to say. She wants to pick this woman up by the neck and shake her. Apparently the blood on her robes does not speak for itself.

"He's wounded," she says. Breathing comes hard.

Excella jumps out of her desk.

_He said you should jump a little higher,_ Jill thinks.

No time for joking.

She follows Excella down the elevator, limping. Excella asks questions like – _how much blood?_ And - w_hat was the cause?_ But the beak doctor can hardly remember.

_There was an explosion_, she says, voice low. _There were knives._

That is all she cares to remember.

Excella falls to her knees at the sight of him, but her eyes are hungry for an opportunity to be of use. She picks up his limp arm. He tries to jerk it away, but she tsks and says something in Italian. Still, her eyes are wide and frozen, unblinkingly frightened.

She barks out a command to one of the scientists. There is a look in her eye that warns Jill that things will not turn out well.

She waits outside the room and remembers how Wesker injects himself. It's always a precise dose, for a precise man. Sometimes he lets Excella do it, but she knows he watches her carefully. He does not think she will turn on him. No he's far too arrogant for that; he thinks she's going to screw it up.

But what interests Jill isn't Excella: it's him. When the needle penetrates his skin, his nostrils unfailingly flare, and Jill watches, fascinated at this ritual emotion.

He can't possibly feel pain anymore.

She thinks about it too much - his exposed arm, his expression when he puts the needle in. It reminds her of a time before he was untouchable. A time when she could feel his pain.

Jill feels disgusted with how acutely she can remember, but it's all she can think about, waiting outside the operating room. Excella was pointed about denying her entry, but hours later, Excella lets her enter. _Keep an eye on him, _she barks. Business calls her away. Like any woman, she would rather stay.

The beak doctor is not a woman. She is a professional. She is a rib. And so she sits all night long in the plastic chair at his bedside.

She's a rib, and a rib can only remember the cage that it comes from.

It's her first natural sleep in ages.

* * *

><p>She wakes up and stops breathing.<p>

She tries to stay very, very quiet, but there's no creak of windows in a storm, no rasping at her neck. There's only peace. Birdsong in the distance. Someone banging some pots or something a few doors down.

When she gets up her bones ache. Everything aches, even her teeth. She checks the clock - how long was she asleep? Twenty minutes? Too long.

The day outside is overcast and gray. Neither of them returned to the office. Neither of them could bear it.

Jill gets up and realizes that all the dirt and blood on her uniform have ruined her sheets. She rakes a hand through her hair and glances at herself in the mirror. What she sees would normally make her wince, but today she's too fatigued to care: greasy hair, dark at the roots, and a streak of something across her cheek. She doesn't want to know what.

She strips it off, bit by bit, until she stands naked in her room. She doesn't know what to do. Ultimately, she climbs in the shower, but all she does in there is try not to cry. Everything feels so surreally real. This is the same shower she takes every morning before work, before dates, after exercising. And now there's brown-red blood spinning down the drain and she's shaking so badly - she hasn't eaten in weeks, it feels like - but she can't bear to throw up anything else.

She puts on a shirt and jeans. Her wet hair smells pleasantly like soap. Soap - not death. Not dust. _Soap._

Like any other day heading to the office.

She calls Chris.

He picks up the fifth ring. It's faster than she would have. She's gotten three calls today, one from her mother and two from solicitors. She's stayed curled in bed, away from all of them.

"You call your sister yet?"

He laughs and it makes her sad. "You call your mother?'

Jill climbs on the desk and sits at its edge. They sit in silence for a minute.

"We should do something," she finally says.

When Chris finally replies, his voice quivers with rage. "Umbrella."

"People need to know."

"We should say something to the chief."

Jill's heart lurches out of her chest. "Chris-"

"The police will find some way to-"

"Chris."

"Jill."

"If Wesker was involved with Umbrella... how far does this go?"

Her mind races with all the jobs Umbrella creates for Raccoon, with all the Safsprins she's taken for all her colds, with all the people who will call her insane. He has no answer.

"We can try," she says. _They'll pay_, she thinks. The old shotgun is in her room. It frightens her and comforts her both at the same time. _Those fuckers will pay._

"Right," he agrees, "We can try."

They sit in silence for a minute more.

"I want to get some of my stuff," she says, and suddenly her voice is small.

He comes to get her less than ten minutes later. The air is so humid that it's hard to breathe, and she rolls the windows down. They don't talk at all. At the department, cars are leaving. Most of the force is heading home for the day. When Jill gets out of the car she realizes she's hanging her head low, trying not to look like herself. She no longer feels like she belongs here.

They leave Chris's junk heap in the driveway and head to the door. When Jill reaches out to get the knob, Chris' hand brushes hers and neither of them takes their hand away.

As they go through the hallways, they receive odd looks.

"Irons wants you in his office," one man says. Jill ignores him. Chris puts his hand on her shoulder.

"I don't need you to protect me," she tells him, but it comes out hollow. They need to protect each other now. He understands when he looks at her: if she's his responsibility, then he is hers, too.

They're all they have left of one another, and they must hold on for dear life.

When they get to the office, Chris flips the switch on.

A sound in the corner of the room sends Jill's hand goes to her thigh, and she panics when she doesn't feel a gun.

Chris's face seems to struggle against itself. Finally, he allows himself to speak, slowly. "Rebecca?" He steps into the room. "Rebecca-"

"Chris-" Jill starts, but she thinks better of it. _All of Bravo Team is dead_. Her heart is sinking into her stomach. _Every one of them-_

Including the eighteen-year-old girl.

_Especially the eighteen-year-old girl._

"It's okay. It's just us. Me. And Jill."

There's a long silence.

(There's no one there.)

"We're alive. You can come out now, Rebecca. It's all going to be all right."

Jill's heart is sinking and sinking and all she wants to do is scream.

"Chris-"

"Jill?" there's a flash of fine brown hair, and then those large light eyes. "Jill? You're alive, too?"

The girl's voice is hoarse; hoarser than Jill's, even. When she gets up from under the desk, her joints crack and something jingles around her neck. "Oh my _God_. I thought-"

She can't continue. She breaks into a dry sob and slumps over the desk. Her clothes are still rotten with gore, and suddenly the memories of last night seem garishly real again. The realest thing about it all is the look in Rebecca's eyes, those mirrors of all the things she's seen. Jill can't bring herself close enough to hold her, but Chris steps up to her and lets her rest in his arms, all big-brother instinct.

"Hey," he says, "It's over."

She takes in a deep breath. There are no tears. Jill knows that she's used them all up already. "We can't let them get away with this. We just can't, we have to do something. Do you know what they do to people? Did you see the-?"

She stops abruptly and gulps in air.

"What are you doing here? Why didn't you go home?"

Her eyes look heavy and sleepy. "Didn't have my key," she says. "Only the office one. And... I had to file a report."

Chris looks at her."About what happened... last night?"

Her hand curl around the jingling things at her neck. Dog tags.

"No. Not... not yet. Not that."

Jill glimpses a white sheet of paper. The date is at the top, neatly written in round, girlish letters, and the report begins below it. _On the night of July 28-_

There's nothing more. It stops there.

"No one will believe us," Rebecca says. Her voice is an attempt at normality. "No one will honestly believe what we saw. They'll think we've lost our minds."

Jill looks back at Rebecca Chambers, eighteen-year-old prodigy. She notices the way her eyes are dry, the way her knuckles are white and shaky. She realizes that tonight has broken her as surely as a hammer breaks glass.

_Eighteen. _

When she strides into Irons's office, Jill throws the papers off his desk. They shout. A crowd gathers. He tells her she's lost her mind.

Maybe she has.

To this day she thinks that - maybe she has.

Maybe she did.

_Wake up, Jill,_ she can hear Chris saying, _wake up._

* * *

><p>He's still quicker than her, even after all her drugs.<p>

_Wake up._

His eyes bleed through the dark, straight at her. He isn't blinking. She finds it unsettling. She tries to pull her arm away from his, but it's like his muscles are made of metal. When she writhes in his grasp, she notices her mask on the ground. She was tossing and turning in her sleep.

"You," he said. "Did you do this?"

His voice is dangerous.

"I don't know what you're talking about." With a quicker jerk, she manages to take her arm away. Her elbow clatters against the operating table, but his eyes don't leave her.

His shoulders tense, muscles ripple. Something's happening underneath the surface, but she can't see what. All she can see is muscles in working order, flesh healed over from burns and stab wounds. She can even see the IVs he pulled out. _You don't like them any more than I do, _she thinks, and it's almost mocking.

"Excella," he spits. "The pig."

"I brought you to her," she says, voice flat as she can make it. "I don't know what she did after that." _She wouldn't let me watch_. She doesn't need to tell him that.

His lips curl back, just for a moment.

"You were dying," she says, voice unusually sharp.

She expects him to strike her again. Instead he sets himself back against the pillow. He's not relaxed - the opposite. Every muscle in his torso is tensed, waiting to strike. It is more like he is slowly directing each of them into a mimicry of relaxation.

"I need the shot."

She gets to her feet.

"No," he says. "Don't get her."

The room feels very still. She can hear a little machine blipping.

"It's right on the table, Jill."

She almost forgot that was her name.

She finds it for him, on the table, prepared by an assistant. This is normally Excella's job. In that moment, Jill marvels at how easily she could squirt some out, how easily she could poison him. How easily she could cripple him. His life is in her hands.

Again.

"Check. Is it thirty milliliters?"

"It is," the beak doctor replies.

He sighs, almost relief. A Pavlovian response. She leans over him. Her cloak - now stiff with blood, his blood, more than hers - grazes his skin.

"Quiet," she says. She relishes it: an order. He says nothing in return, and it sits. Her fingers go to his bicep.

"Not the muscle - the vein. Quickly."

She does not hurry, but her fingers go to the vivid blue of his vein. It must be this one - Jill remembers vaguely from her first-aid training - because he does not object.

She swabs the needle and brings it to the tip of his skin. Her fingers press in as she injects. His relief comes in the form of a hiss; his muscles unwind under her fingertips.

She thumbs over the puncture and her fingers leave his skin.

But his blood is in her, now.

* * *

><p>Their screaming matches are ill-concealed.<p>

"I saved your life," she says, through tears. In English for Wesker's benefit, even though Jill can hardly make out her words. Excella's Italian accent thickens considerably with emotion.

"You have doomed me." _His_ voice is clear and precise. Jill knows that his punishment will not be so clean.

When he exits the room, apparently calm, she follows on his heels without looking at Excella. It is the loudest she has ever heard him raise his voice. It's unusual behavior for him, but she does not dwell on it. She tries not to dwell on anything, anymore, if she can help it.

"She's a fool," he mutters, suddenly stopping short. He mutters an insult in Italian that Jill can recognize, just barely. "She only obscures my ultimate objective."

He takes his glasses off, and rubs at the bridge of his nose. Jill stares at his glass eye despite herself. It's blue; light, sky blue. Blue like freedom and nature and all the things Wesker isn't. Was he ever?

When she grasps, Jill remembers that Captain Wesker's eyes used to be blue. Maybe.

They don't make glass eyes in red, she guesses.

(He has worked and worked to make the perfect artificial eye, Jill knows. She has watched him try. But his body is stronger than than both real and fake organs - any living tissue - and it rejects it, kills it, overwhelms it. To think that any part of him is useless -)

"What is it?"

His voice is almost soft, but it is deceptive in its softness. It speaks of a trap underneath.

She knows he doesn't want an answer and so she doesn't provide one. She's gotten good at his games. At his puzzles. She's solved so many of them.

"I know you can speak. Go on. I know there's nothing wrong with your tongue."

_Of course not_, she thinks,_ it would be a blow to your ego._

The only excuse she can make is that she's near the end of a P30 hit.

He takes her by the chin. She looks up at him through her red-eyed mask. A part of her should be frightened. She can feel the brush of his fingertips at the places where the mask meets skin, the way they itch to reveal her.

She's not frightened. Only tired of her heart pounding so loud.

His thumb traces a line along her jaw. Clinical. Objective. But she can feel it press harder than it needs to.

She says nothing.

He drops her suddenly, like she is too hot to touch.

"Perhaps I should make it so," and this time, she wonders if he isn't directing the cut in his voice at himself. Hopefully not at her tongue. She would like to use it again. Someday.

"Come along," he says, turning from her. The glasses go back on.

* * *

><p>"Chris will come this time," he says, cutting Excella off. His certainty leaves no room for error. "I have - shall we say - something he wants." He smiles faintly.<p>

The beak doctor holds her breath, but he doesn't look her way.

The voice on the other side of the reception falters. Then she speaks again, through the static. Her accent makes it harder to understand her. "We have the weapons in reserve. If he brings the BSAA into this-"

"He may," Wesker says, as though a small army is of no concern to him. "But we are more than equipped to deal with him. Unless you have less than the necessary resources to stave him off?"

There is a long pause on the other end. Then:

"I have it perfectly under control. I will show you, Albert - things will play out perfectly."

Jill hears her voice waver with emotion.

_Emotion_. When she thinks, she thinks in Wesker's voice: _how trite_.

Wesker does not even smirk. He only steeples his fingers and leans back into the dark leather chair. The glass eyes of the stuffed bird seem to gleam with fear now, a warning more than ever.

"Now all we have to do is wait."

* * *

><p>They sit there listening to static. Hours on end of static. Finally a female voice, crying out in Italian.<p>

He says nothing. He looks at her and she knows.

This is the relationship they have now: they have bled into one being, and they do not even need to touch to communicate. In some ways, they are one creature, and she isn't sure whether it's the drugs or the time or all that blood.

* * *

><p>She can hear something bubbling in the corner. The room stinks of stale sweat and ammonia, barely masking the smell of death outside. She licks her dry lips. She can still taste the bile from vomiting in the bathroom - she tries to think of what she ate last, but comes out short. Last afternoon feels like a lifetime ago.<p>

There's nothing in the room, but she cocks her shotgun.

She stares into the filthy tank and sees some kind of frog floating on top of the water. She doesn't look for long.

She turns to the bees, reaches out to touch their crackling bodies, pinned wings. They remind her of snow. She blinks. They don't look like snow; she's just getting white spots in her vision.

They make her think of fairytales, though, and of how Jill Valentine, good student, good daughter, ended up in hell.

_Focus, Jill._ It's Wesker's voice. The captain always keeps them calm, but now she's nearly as worried about his disappearance as she is Chris's. _Chris._

She has to think: there's another puzzle in here.

How can she spell eternity in the ice?

* * *

><p>Jill thinks of puzzles as she descends into the labs. Of bee and stained glass, of dead birds and rotten flesh. Of the labs, steely-smelling with blood and metal.<p>

This lab is clean and new, and Jill wonders when it was made and what it does. The beak doctor shushes her. _It doesn't matter,_ she thinks, _just do your job._

Her boots echo in the silent corridor. They speak of business. The beak doctor is nothing but her duty.

When she rounds a corner she finds the Italian woman in a locked room, scared and folded under a desk. She had a pistol at her thigh and five needles in her briefcase, all filled with things Jill could never name.

Excella curses in Italian and stands awkwardly. Her insect-limbs tangle as she pulls herself up. "What took you so long? I was afraid Albert had... well. You are here."

Her face is smeared. Her hair is frizzed. Her expression is defiant, daring Jill to mention her fear and helplessness, the cool she was forced to lose, the human weakness she was forced to admit.

The feminine weakness, too: _I was afraid he had betrayed m_e or, worse, _I was afraid he had forgotten me._

But the beak doctor does not speak.

She can't let herself enjoy this, no matter how much she wants to.

Her hands go for Excella's neck.

* * *

><p>It's hard to talk over the blades of a helicopter, so Jill doesn't.<p>

_I killed him_, she wants to tell Chris. I_ took his gun. They had his family hostage, but I took his gun._

She does not want to think about that hunched girl-thing, that cancer, those leathery skins over a mutant tongue. All the thing wanted was a little girl's mother. All Barry wanted was his wife and daughters. All Jill Valentine - coward - wanted was to live.

_I let him die_.

* * *

><p>Something twists in her stomach.<p>

It didn't feel good, after all.

The room looks a mess. The body does, too. It lies still and bent like wire. A leg juts out at an odd angle where the beak doctor grabbed her and pulled her down with a crunch. That foot is bare; the shoe is somewhere in the lab, flung off during her struggle. Her face is paling slowly. Mostly it's the color of clotted blood - _where has Jill seen that before?_ She nudges the head over with her boot so she doesn't have to look at those glassy eyes.

Jill feels her knees going weak. The spot where Excella stabbed a needle in feels sore. What was in those needles? Was Excella prepared for this? Was she expecting this from Wesker?

She should have, but women are rarely wise to the men they love.

Was she expecting that from Jill, too? Did she see Jill as a personal threat?

It suddenly occurs to her that she and Wesker are alive and this woman is dead.

The beak doctor picks up her mask and arranges it on her face, breathing deeply. It tastes like familiarity. The broken glass crunches as Jill stumbles out of the room.

In the hall, her sense of direction goes bad on her. Everything flips and undulates. There are so many stainless white hallways that she can't find her way through. She starts with the right, picking up her pace, until all that fills her hearing is the clack of boot on tile, boot on tile.

She stops short at a junction.

There's a long silence.

His gasp fills up the room.

_Don't recognize m_e, she thinks, and she wishes that she could make it true.

He steps forward.

"Jill," he says. He's supporting his new partner on his back. The woman's eyes are heavy. She's got rope marks around her wrists and neck, and a cut badly bandaged near her ear.

_I have something he wants._

It wasn't Jill, after all.

The beak doctor steps back.

"Wait," he says, "Don't go! Jill! You don't have to do this!"

She doesn't know what he means, she can't know, and so she gnashes her teeth against words.

The shot. Excella gave her something –

She falls to her knees and clenches at her head. A horrible headache is blooming behind her forehead.

"Jill-!"

Whatever Excella gave her is - something. Something evil.

"_Jill_!" Chris's voice is in her ear, a warm, comforting murmur. His partner is half-conscious. She's leaning against the wall, clutching her side and trying to stand. The beak doctor notices the way that his partner's legs wobble and shake and curses her own for giving out under her.

She swats at Chris's arm. "No," she rasps. Her throat closes up on her, and she can't find it in her to say anything more.

"Jill, whatever you did-"

"Get away from me-"

His arms wrap around her. She has no will left to fight. "It's going to be okay, Jill."

That's not her name.

But her heart aches in her chest, and she can't find it in her to correct him. Her fingers go there - to her heart. To the ache. Chris's eyes watch her. She's kneeling on the floor but the floor is tilting, like the wave of a ship. The waves of that ship, the Queen -

She shuts her eyes only to open them.

"I can't lose you again," she says.

Chris unzips her suit roughly. He's uninterested in skin, only in what's nailed on top. "What the-"

"A plate," says the woman against the wall. "It's distributing some sort of drug, direct to the bloodstream. It must be TriCell's-"

There's a scream in the distance, ripped from a dying throat. Gurgling. The sound of scurrying echoes through the ventilation.

Chris curses under his breath. "We need to get out of here - Jill - can you-"

"Chris-"

In one fell motion, he rips the plate from her chest. She screams, an echo of the death-scream before it. All three of them can hear the sound of the monster getting faster and closer, faster and closer -

Jill gasps like a fish for water. The cut from the P30 is instantaneous, and it only makes her feel tireder and dizzier. She falls back in his arms, losing conciousness even as he tries to hold onto her.

"I can't," she says. Simple as that. She thinks of Wesker. She thinks of what Jill Valentine would do. "You have to stop him..."

Chris reaches out to touch her face. His worry is palpable; she can feel it in his fingertips. She wishes she had the words to explain that he's already mourned Jill Valentine. She doesn't want him to have to do it twice.

"I'll be okay," she promises. A lie. Jill Valentine was never a liar.

A licker pops out of a vent, but before it can jump them the girl at the wall has popped three shotgun shells into its head. Its head spurts before it can even reach the ground.

"Chris," she says, "They've unleashed the lab's B.O.W.s. We need to go."

The woman's eyes are wide now, but the beak doctor doesn't fail to notice the way her hand flickers to her wound. Neither does Chris. He looks at her, then back to the body in his arms.

"You need to stop him," she repeats. She makes an effort to stand. "I'll be okay. You need to get him. You're the only one who can." Jill tried. Now he's the only survivor. It must be a good enough imitation for him, because he lets go of her.

His partner cuts in. "There will be more coming. Are you armed?"

"Yes," she lies again. "Go. Now."

They do. Chris looks over his shoulder. "We'll find you," he promises. "Get out alive, and we'll find you." She listens to their footsteps from down the hallway.

She counts to five.

She falls again.

She should feel proud of herself, but all she feels is feverish.

* * *

><p>The black-masked men pick at her with a kind of caution, prodding her with the tips of their boots and their guns. They wake her up from something, and whatever puzzle it is she leaves unsolved.<p>

"Is she dead?"

_Yes,_ she thinks.

Some kind of gurgle escapes her throat, but they don't take note of it. Instead one flips her over.

One curses in African. BSAA.

_BSAA._

She tries to stand up, but all she can do is twitch, like a bug.

"Do you know who this is?"

"You're not telling me...?"

"Jill Valentine."

"_Valentine._ You sure this is her?"

_It's not,_ she wants to answer, but her throat is so dry.

One man slings her over his shoulder. He wobbles a little, but takes the extra weight well.

"Let's get her out of here.

_No,_ she thinks, l_et me..._

But the shot hits, and the beak doctor doesn't think anymore.

* * *

><p><em>"She no longer appeared of ice as before, when she sat outside the window, and beckoned to him; in his eyes she was perfect, he did not fear her at all..."<em>

_- Hans Christen Anderson, "The Snow Queen"_


	3. reanimation

_Fix me._

* * *

><p>AN: This may be why I like RE5's ending better. Dying in a volcano via rocket launcher leaves lots of sequel potential. A _big _thank you for reading this far. I hope you enjoyed the ride. I ALWAYS appreciate feedback, so if you have any, be sure to leave it!

* * *

><p><em>The way a crow<em>

_Shook down on me_

_The dust of snow_

_From a hemlock tree_

"Dust of Snow", Robert Frost

* * *

><p><strong><em>A Glass Eye<em>**

_3: reanimation_

* * *

><p><em>"-they put so much money into her. Do you see-?"<em>

_"- doubtlessly damage them. We can be certain of that much. Whatever's going through her veins is pricy -"_

_"-I hear he-"_

_"-seems fine, no signs of outward trauma. But did you see her –"_

_"-scars. Redfield said she fell of a cliff. She looks fine -"_

_"-patched her together -"_

_"- himself?"_

There is quiet for a moment, like they're examining her scars in a new light. She can hear the scuffle of medical tools. Then they resume their talk, in whispers, as though she can't hear them.

* * *

><p>"What the hell is that?"<p>

She holds it up to the flickering light and allows herself a brief moment of respite. The sweat sticking to her hair, the way her soles ache - forget about it. Triumph. "My lock picks."

"And what do you even fucking do with that?"

It's a zombie apocalypse, Jill thinks. She can't be picky about who she has to ally with.

"What do you _think _I'm going to do with them?"

"Hey, hey. It's all cool, okay? It just makes a guy wonder. Where'd an officer of the law learn to pick locks?" His voice sounds admiring, or else Jill's imagining it.

She traces the torsion wrench, with its sharp right angle, then the curving snake. "My father," she says. It's the zombie apocalypse. If they even make it out alive, he won't remember. Second time's the charm, she thinks, and her skin crawls at a far-off moaning.

He leans on the table, balancing on his gun. It's horrible gun safety. South America needs to tighten up on that. For half a second, Jill can imagine Barry saying something about it, or Wesker giving him that chilling look. For about half a second. His eyes narrow and he turns his head and squints, like he's seeing her in a new light. "Funny thing for a father to teach a kid."

"Yeah," she agrees, "Funny."

It wasn't funny at all. Sometimes she thinks that it was all he had to teach, all he had to give his seven-year-old daughter. Other times she wishes he hadn't given her anything at all.

_It saved your life, though_, she thinks. It doesn't make her any more grateful.

She's going to die tonight, anyway.

At least she had the strength to fight.

* * *

><p>She lies curled up in her ball, biting her tongue so as not to make sound. She knows she'll speak and it will come out gibberish. All she can do is strain her body into stillness. All she can do is endure.<p>

_It will be over soon, _she thinks, _they said it would be over-_

A funeral march starts playing dim in the back of her mind, only to come to the forefront. She can feel her fingers aching to reach for the keys. (When did she learn to play that on the piano? It's so morbid. But she wants to feel good at something again, competent, in control-)

"I should warn you that she's not going to be herself."

Footsteps. Jill can hear a familiar doctor – the one who always has the blue pens in his breast pocket – speaking on the other side of the tinted windows that line one wall of her room.

"She's going through withdrawal, then," Chris says ruefully. "He drugged her – right. I get it."

Jill strains. The words are hard to make out.

"This is more than withdrawal. A Progenitor – or 'T-virus' as you might say - derivative was administered long ago. The 'P30', as Miss Valentine identifies it, was not actually the cause of her enhanced ability."

"Get to the point."

"At its most basic, the injection she received was not the only source of what you reported as-" a flip of the clipboard "-'_superhuman strength and speed_'. It was only an ancillary enzyme…"

His voice softens. Jill's brains can't stay sharp for long and his words run together. She forms his words silently: _ancillary. Necrosis. _They feel slick and pasty in her mouth, like uncooked dough.

Then Chris speaks, again, and she tries to focus.

"…Jill said she got a vaccination. Years ago."

"You might have told us beforehand," the doctor says drily. "We only found that through testing. "

"So what's making her… like this?"

The doctor skirts so long around the topic that by the time he gets to the point Jill hasn't comprehended a thing. It all begins and confusion and ends in _–ase. _But she knows he's come to something somber, because Chris goes silent.

Then he enters. A click of the door as it opens, a creak as it shuts. Jill turns on her cot to give him her back.

She closes her eyes. Maybe she can pretend to be asleep.

He comes close and sits at the cot's corner. It makes a creaking noise – he's so big and bulky. A normal guy might try and push her hair back at this point, or put a hand on her back, but Chris just sits there waiting. Finally she opens her eyes.

"You feeling okay?"

Her throat constricts.

How did she ever think this would be okay?

"They said you're gonna be okay, Jill."

He's a shit liar. She just doesn't know how to tell him. Her heartbeat starts going faster, as though to warm her from all the cold thoughts that are taking her over. She starts to shiver, so much that she can hear the bed shake. The wet sheets feel clammy against her skin.

"_Look at me," _she says suddenly, trying desperately to make him understand. She sits up straight and stares straight at him. She puts her hand around his arm. She's surprised to find that his bicep's gone even bigger – is it drugs? Has he been doing drugs? "Don't you feel it? I've gone cold."

He looks at her with unadulterated worry. _This isn't Jill Valentine. _So he's finally realized.

"You feel perfectly fine," he says, soothing, "You just have a fever."

A fever. A fever. She's shaking and sweating cold bullets and she has a _fever. _It's such a joke. She can't imagine ever being warm again.

* * *

><p>"You must be Jill."<p>

The woman in the doorway is hesitant, but straight-forward. Kind but not soft. She smiles at Jill. The hijab is gone. Instead she has a gun at the right of her belt; two long, sharp knives are strapped to the left. _One of those – _but Jill won't let herself complete the thought.

She even has a tattoo over her arm, something in Swahili, foreign letters that swim like alphabet soup in Jill's bleary mind. Jill closes her eyes briefly, then opens them again. The world won't stop swimming.

"And you must be Sheva." Jill manages a smile. This woman reminds her of her (before), and Jill likes her.

Confusion slips in unbidden: _is _this woman Jill? Did she slip into Jill's place while Jill wasn't looking? _You aren't even yourself anymore, _the confusion says, _who's that pale blonde you saw while you tried to brush your teeth this morning?_ The thought makes her sad. The world is spinning. Her head is pounding. She can't deal with this right now.

Sheva walks with a slight limp. Jill remembers that it's where she was wounded during her outing with Chris. _It's not healed yet, _she thinks.

"Sorry," she says, when she realizes Sheva has said something. "I'm kind of... not feeling great right now." She's feeling lucid, though, and that's more she can say for most of her waking hours.

"Anyone would feel the same," the woman says, and she pauses. "Chris won't be in today. He wanted me to come and talk to you."

"Ah." Jill closes her eyes. "BSAA business."

"Yes. You must be eager to return to it, after..."

_After it's fucked you over a thousand times. _

There's a long pause.

"You must be eager to return to bioterrorism after all you've been through."

Jill blinks rapidly and sways. She tries to pretend it's a cough, and she clears her throat. "Yeah."

The woman comes closer. She has a gun. Jill hasn't used a gun in years. She almost misses it. Guns come from a place where kills were good and her hands couldn't snap necks.

She tries to come back into the moment. It's so hard. Her stomach growls loudly.

The woman talks, something in her lilting accent, but Jill only feels dizzy. She breathes in deeply, trying to wake herself up, but she can't.

In the next moment, Jill lunges at her.

* * *

><p>When Chris comes in to meet her, she can see the way he holds himself back. His eyes never leave her, but he stays in the door frame, like a twenty-something waiting to be invited back into her apartment.<p>

"It's fine," she says. She realizes how tired she sounds, but she hopes that he doesn't. She closes her eyes and sighs deeply. "You can come in. I'm fine. They said…"

Her voice crackles.

He looks at her.

"You should go." Her voice is flat. Already, she's exerted her quota of optimism.

He takes a step toward her. "Jill. It's not the end for you. I know how you must feel, and trust me, you're gonna be okay."

Jill doesn't interrupt him, but she can't tell him how wrong he is. _You don't know how I feel, _she thinks. _You want to, but you can't. _She only stays quiet.

She thinks of the Spencer estate. Of the smell of death. Of the fear, of the loneliness. Of her desire to live, and not to become one of those _things_.

_But now you are, _she tells herself. She grinds the truth in, like gravel into a wound. _Now you are. _

He cares so much about her, but she feels like she's been cut off from him. From the rest of the world.

"What I did-"

"You were feverish. Drugged. They tried to give you something; it didn't work. But your brain wouldn't even be like this if it weren't for… This is Wesker's fault, Jill, not yours. Never blame yourself for what _he _did."

Jill doesn't know how to reply. _I should've fought harder, _she thinks. _You don't understand. I had a hundred opportunities. If I'd fought harder, I could have done it. I could have ended it all, saved the world. _

She doesn't say any of this to Chris. Instead, he pulls up a plastic chair and sits in front of her. After a moment, she feels deeply uncomfortable, but for a long time – minutes, hours, Jill can't tell how long, only that it was interminable – he does not go. He stays seated in front of her, a mirror, hands clasped.

"I will always forgive you," he says. "Whatever you do, I'll always forgive you. You know that, right? _You came back for me, _Jill. You didn't have to, but you came back for me. Whatever you think you are, you're not."

* * *

><p>She knocks at the door and waits, going so far as to tuck her hands under her arms. Her fingers, numb with cold, are good for little else. Curling and uncurling them comes with effort.<p>

Jill hears scuffling behind the door, and ultimately a woman's face appears in the window. Jill can practically hear the debate going on her mind, but ultimately the woman cracks open the door. Jill is alone, after all; a young woman with mismatched winter gear and a Volvo parked out front.

"Can I help you?"

The snow nearly swallows her voice, even this close. It's heavier, here in Canada.

Jill can't think of what to say. It's been a while – Chris knew Barry's family better than she had, and she'd let him break the news and warn them north.

Fifteen hours of road trip later, Jill still doesn't know why she's on this doorstep. She only knows that part of her needs recognition.

Her numbed fingers fumble for her pocket where, less than delicately, she takes out a scrap of paper.

"Here," she says, leaning into the doorway. Her breath is a cloud. "Take it."

The woman looks at her like she wants no piece of Jill's business.

Jill's hands are shaking with some emotion she can't name. Fear, maybe. Guilt. But her rough, red fingertips remain, clutching that scrap of paper.

Finally the woman takes it.

Before she can open it, Jill is already heading back to her Volvo, hands tucked under her arms, face tucked into her chest. The snow is so thick that she can hardly pull out of the driveway; the car slides a little on the ice and tears against the soft, new snow. Jill dares to glimpse out the window as she leaves.

Mrs. Burton stares back at her from the doorway.

* * *

><p>"He's dead."<p>

She looks up at him. The dark shadows under her eyes betray her lack of sleep. She's perfectly clean and brushed, but listless. She thinks they might have injected her with something new – she's hungry all the time, and so tired. Still she manages a somber expression appropriate to the occasion.

For her, it feels like flexing a hand after weeks in a cast, except that whatever it is feels like it's still broken.

"Are you sure?"

_Good. _She even sounds like Jill – serious, even. She could get used to this. She sits on her hands and tries to remember the moment that she bit Sheva Alomar. It comes hazy, but she remembers it well enough. She just can't remember how long it's been. She wants to ask Chris if they've dosed her again, but she's so sick of it. _Just let it pass. _

Chris leans back in his chair and breathes in deep. "I'm sure. Jill, I'm sure. This was it."

She gets the sense that this is final and he doesn't want to talk about it. She knows it won't have been an easy victory.

"How sure are you?"

Chris looks at her like he does not want to be having this conversation. "There were heavy guns involved," he says slowly. "And fire. Lots of fire."

Suddenly, Jill understands that he is holding back for her benefit, just as he held himself in the doorway the other day. And, just as suddenly, she realizes that Chris does not know her as well as he wants. He has embraced her like Jill Valentine, but he knows as well as she does that she is not the same, and has treaded appropriately.

"It can't be. You don't understand, Chris - he won't go down that easily. It can't be."

It isn't that she has any personal stake in the matter. It simply can't be.

Chris looks at her sadly. He lays a hand on her shoulder. "Jill. It's over now. We can breathe. You're gonna be okay."

"You don't know that." She does something odd: she shrugs away from him. She gets up and goes to sit on her cot, staring at the white wall above Chris's head. _He's insane, _she thinks frantically, _he's letting his guard down. He's going to get us when we least expect it – how could the BSAA be so sloppy?_

She can hear Chris's voice from far away.

She doesn't answer.

She just stares at the wall.

* * *

><p>"<em>You don't understand - he's not dead, he can't be, he can't-"<em>

It's not that she has any personal stake in the matter.

It simply _can't be. _

They stick the needle in, and next time, Jill won't bring it up, even if she knows she's right.

* * *

><p>She parks far away, but already she can hear the stillness. All the animals fled that day. <em>Animals and everything else, <em>she tells herself. When she thinks back on it, she wonders how many were here in the first place. Couldn't they smell the corruption?

She walks the rest of the way there, over the charred remains. Some little sprouts are starting to grow, but they already look thirsty and yellow in the August heat. She feels thirsty herself. Why didn't she bring a water bottle? All her bruises and cuts are starting to look better; she should stop wearing sweatshirts. People keep giving her weird looks, but the truth is, she can't stand to have anyone see the vicious bite marks near her neck, including herself.

She feels normal, aside from the heat, so she doesn't worry. Too much.

After walking for a while, she comes to the familiar place where something glints. She opens it. Cool air leaks out, but she can't bring herself to go on. It was such a boon to find this entrance. Such a boon, and such a dud.

She parks far away, but already she can hear the stillness. All the animals fled that day. _Animals and everything else, _she tells herself. When she thinks back on it, she wonders if there were any living animals here in the first place. Couldn't they smell the corruption?

She walks the rest of the way there, over the charred remains. Some little sprouts are starting to grow, but they already look thirsty and yellow in the August heat. She feels thirsty herself. Why didn't she bring a water bottle? All her bruises and cuts are starting to look better; she should stop wearing sweatshirts. People keep giving her weird looks, but the truth is, she can't stand to have anyone see the vicious bite marks near her neck, including herself.

But she feels normal, aside from the heat, so she doesn't worry. Too much.

After walking for a while, she comes to the familiar place where something glints. She pulls it up and drops in without thinking.

It's cooler underground.

But she can't bring herself to go on.

She's explored the maze underneath so well that she knows it like she knows the veins on the back of her hand. She's still not found anything. Umbrella was thorough in its efforts: not a single trace to be found of bio-experimentation, not a single document or bloody handprint. Only the shell of _something_ remains.

Instead she leans against the wall and closes her eyes. She breathes in. Everything smells of smoke. She feels like a small animal hibernating - her sweatshirt feels good down here, even if her sweat is drying in a cold sheen over her forehead.

It feels so good down here.

There is a rustle of something above. Jill's eyes snap open, and her neck cranes up. All she can see is that burning circle of light denoting the entrance, but she scurries out anyway, a mouse frightened from its nest.

Exiting into the light is always the hardest part. She sways like she's drunk. The sun always feels like it burns her skin. She squints, but she can't see anything. _Just my imagination._

She thinks of the bite marks at her neck.

_No. _She can't allow herself to worry.

Walking back to the car in the heat, Jill nearly wants to vomit. _I should be eating better, _she thinks. Nothing has set well with her for the past month. She hasn't been sleeping well, either. Last night Chris came to visit. They talked in whispers until dawn. He should be – what? Halfway to France by now?

She wishes him luck. With all her heart. If she wants anything, she wants revenge. She wants righteousness. She wants Umbrella buried alive.

She leans down and takes a pebble in her hand, feeling the weight of it. She walks farther from her car, closer to the edges of forest, where trees still remain, charred though they are.

_How do you explain the tunnels? s_he'd screamed, _And the bombing? Why the bombing?_

Irons had looked at her like she was a shrill bird who had repeated nonsense too many times.

_It's called PTSD, _he said. He would _fucking _know. He'd never seen war.

_He's a traitor to humanity, _Jill thinks, throwing the stone farther out into forest. She can hear it land somewhere. When she takes a step forward, something cracks under her boot.

She looks down slowly.

A watch.

She picks it up by the strap. The face is broken from her boot, shards of glass revealing a bare, pale face. The time reads 5:42.

Jill does the math in her head. It's about one in the afternoon. The watch has to be from this morning, at the very latest.

Except that she knows this watch. A little too nice for a policeman, made from sturdy, unyielding metal. For some reason, Jill remembers it.

Wesker.

Fucking Wesker.

_But he's dead, _she reminds herself. _No one comes back from the dead._

Her skin prickles anyway. _5:42. _She'd remember that time anywhere. At 5:42 she was in a helicopter, waiting for the blast in the distance.

_There's no way._

She pockets the watch anyway.

* * *

><p>Wesker stares at her from across the room.<p>

"You shouldn't be here," she tells him.

He smiles at her, all tight and intentional. He never did anything unintentionally. Sometimes, Jill thinks she can remember him smiling, at least a little bit, before. Most of the time she thinks she's fooling herself. Something as human as smiling is lost on him, even before he became a fucking bioweapon cocktail.

"Tell your guards as much."

Jill's eyes slink away from him to the window. Slowly, so they won't notice. The last time she saw him, she freaked out and they had to sedate her. (_They say they have a substitute, that they're weaning her off the drug, but if this is weaning Jill just wants it back-)_

"You're not really dead."

He stands and clicks his tongue. "Surprise, surprise. You've more common sense than the rest of them put together, Jill. So clever for you to recognize it."

She grits her teeth and squeezes her eyes shut.

"They think you did it for me, but you know that you could have broken away if you were strong enough. Killed yourself, even, put a wrench, as they say, into my machinations. But you didn't. And it's your fault. They don't understand, so they can never _forgive_. And that's all you want, isn't it, Jill? Understanding? For someone to recognize the fact that instead of killing yourself you killed innocents, and that it was not me, but _you_."

She waits ten seconds. Breathes in. Breathes out.

"You're not real," she says again.

This time, when she opens her eyes, he's not there.

It's almost a blessing. Her force of will has changed reality, and for a moment she feels like she might be okay.

The withdrawal comes and goes, depending on what dose of their shit they're testing on her. But it's not the real thing, and every day is different. Today is a good day, and she allows herself to win.

* * *

><p>It takes a moment to identify him. Her vision is blurry and everything is painfully bright. When she sees the glint of his sunglasses, she thinks she might be having a hallucination, so she balls up tighter under the BSAA-issue blanket and squeezes her eyes shut.<p>

"Go away," she says. She speaks as much to the pain as to the Wesker-vision.

"Poor Jill," says the voice. It even sounds like him. "They don't have what you need, do they?"

She dares to look up again. She feels like a newborn, with her difficult sight. Sweat rolls down her forehead, lies damp and sticky under her blanket and sleeves. Goosebumps, too. "What-"

He leans down to grab her. The withdrawal must be going sour, she thinks, as he takes her arm. He feels so real. Her head lolls into his shoulder. He even smells real. That clean, slight smell of cologne mingled so strangely with formaldehyde.

He's cold, too. So gloriously cold. She wraps her sweating fingers around his cold hand and brings it to her forehead.

"_It's time to go," _he says, and to her ear it's almost a murmur. There's enough P30 left in her system that she stands, even though he's already curled his hand around her arm. He meets her eyes for a moment and then, briskly, they leave the room. In his presence, the blurriness eases, but only slightly. The sight of him promises a hit. Her heart flutters.

There are blood smears on the walls. A shriek of something inhuman rings in the distance. A dead BSAA member sits aside the wall, throat mauled, blank eyes gazing upward. Jill looks away quickly, before she can identify him.

_You're not Jill, _the drug reminds her, _you're still the beak doctor. _

The beak doctor knows: _Jill would rather die than do this. _

"Where are we going?"

Her mouth feels dry. A drink. She needs a drink. She's so fucking hot she feels like she's going to die.

She needs a hit.

Wesker looks at her. "Away."

She takes that as an answer. Everything feels unstable. It reminds her of a child's game – spin around until the world shakes and the floor rushes up to meet you. All for that airy high.

His car is parked out in the driveway, one of TriCell's less conspicuous Jeeps. He takes the driver's seat and she sits aside him, nearly tripping as she hops in. His eyes are on the spot between her collarbones where the scabs from the plate were. They ooze pus, infected despite the BSAA's best efforts. She couldn't stop scratching.

"We will secure a replacement," he says. His eyes fall on the BSAA headquarters and she sees a flash of white teeth as he smiles. It's more like a wolf raising its lips.

"How much of this is about Chris?" she asks. His name crackles on her tongue.

"Everything, Jill. Everything. Until he's dead, I can have no peace."

* * *

><p>"I just have trouble seeing women in law enforcement," her mother tells her. She's chewing at her cheek. Jill knows her mother does that when she's holding something back.<p>

"I can do the job as well as any man can." It's a reflex. She's responding to her mother's hammer on her heart. Her mother looks up over her coffee mug and sighs.

"I graduated near the top of my glass, Mom. Look. Salutatorian. See?" _I'm not my cousins, Mom. I'm not going to get knocked up right out of high school. I can defuse a bomb. I can pick any lock. I can take a fall rolling. I'm smart and quick and the army training paid for my college tuition. What more do you want?_

"I know, Jill. I know that."

"You don't think that makes a difference? That I'm actually good at this?"

Her mother sets her coffee cup down on the table, then stares at the diploma. The cup has a chip in it, and the table has rings where they've both left sweating water. "I think that ultimately a woman will always try to help people. Women are wired to be in-tune emotionally."

She doesn't agree with that. It sounds like something that comes out of one of her mother's housekeeping magazines. _But. _"I _am _helping people."

"Just look at your father. What did he do? Left me, left you and your sister."

_It was just six months, Mom, _but that's not true. It was more than that. It was six months of worry and strain and a messy divorce a year later. Jill remembers her father and all the fun of the locks. It twists her stomach.

"He was in _jail. _And what did I do?"

Jill doesn't have to answer. Her mother looks up at her, with eyes as pale-blue as her daughter's. Her hands are clasped around her cold coffee.

"Can you hurt people? Even criminals?"

_Yes, _she thinks fiercely, _the answer is yes._

* * *

><p>"They've already taken the labs," he says, as though this is just another order of business. "We won't be able to return there."<p>

Jill has her head in her knees. Every breath feels like some monster is trying to break out of her skull. _Maybe it's true, maybe he - _

Covering her eyes and breathing slowly helps. Talking doesn't. She found that out the day she nearly killed that woman – Sheva. _If I don't get the P30..._

She doesn't know what will happen. She just knows she won't be able to live without it. Not if living feels like this.

Can she outlast it?

Chris's warmth is a bare memory. All she wants is the kiss of a cold needle: one kiss to obey and another to forget. She wants to feel oblivion.

As though reading her mind, he reaches down into his briefcase and looks for something. Somehow, his eyes never leave the road. She only catches the barest glint of needle before she feels the sting in her neck.

She cries out and jerks back from him, shaking. Her mouth trembles, and her lips form the word, but her breath doesn't come to sound it.

_P30._

It's the real thing, and it comes without apologies.

* * *

><p>Everything still hurts. She closes her eyes and tries to sleep, but within an hour the P30 has kept her up in place of the withdrawal. The roads are clear. It's cooler at night. She can see animals shifting through the brush, in and out like nightmare-shadows. If she looks up at the sky, though, she can see the stars. It would almost be beautiful. Different from Raccoon City, definitely, where the light pollution made everything so dim.<p>

In the darkness, everything looks so clean and clear. It's all so beautiful that for a moment, Jill Valentine can understand Albert Wesker.

She closes her eyes and breathes deeply, then turns her aching neck so she's facing him. The understanding has already fled. The pain in her head is still there, but she can think enough that the shame weighs heavier on her than the headache, enough for her to regret her decision.

"Why did you come back for me?"

She expects an answer like _You are an asset _or _You are an achievement _or _You know too much. _

Instead she gets silence.

He gestures to his bag. "A tranquilizer. Use it."

She is powerless to resist. The second kiss.

* * *

><p>"<em>Lei la guardò tutto il tempo lei era lì<em>," the Italian woman says. "_Avete il suo amore?_"

Her voice is aggressive, on-edge. Jill isn't surprised about the first part.

The second part of the statement, though, makes her laugh - a mute laugh, a dog's laugh - under her hood. Both of them look at her as though remembering her presence. Jill can't help but feel that old rotten flower blooming in her gut. It might just be the shock of laughter, even though she's at the end of a dosage of P30 and that's when all the accidents happen. It shouldn't surprise her.

That Italian is so basic that even she can understand. Amore. _Love. _Does he _love _her.

* * *

><p>It takes another few hours and the P30 is racing through her. No more talk. Her body thrills on its dose.<p>

When she wakes up she's still in her dream-space. She finds that she's tracing the scars on her palm, one where his stitching used to be.

"We will arrive at the helipad in less than an hour. I've made arrangements to get us out of Africa. Once we are there I will begin to develop a dupe for the P30 and continue my efforts with the Uroboros."

Jill shouldn't be shocked by mention of his inhumanity anymore, and she isn't. Uroboros is just another project. She wouldn't have been able to _live _if she'd been associating that word with the truth all these years.

But suddenly she does, and she stops tracing her scar.

"Wesker," she says, and it's strange to address him, "Don't do this."

He smirks. _You're in a position to talk. _

She grabs him by his coat lapel, half violent and half desperate. "_Don't. _Don't do it. Think about what you're doing – a _massacre - _"

He breaks sharply. The car spins off the road and stops, halted a few feet veered of the road. They're a few yards from a hundred foot drop; what does he care? He throws her away. Her head bangs into the side of the car and she bites her lip. When she parts her mouth and turns back to him, she can taste steel, can feel the bright red blood welling up from the wound.

He stares at it for a moment.

She licks it away and wonders why this feels familiar.

"You will not ask me again."

"I'm not asking. This is crazy. You're crazy. Don't you realize what you're _doing?_"

He laughs, cold and hard.

"And are you in any position to stop me, Jill?"

His fingers reach out for the scabbed, oozing wound at her chest, and she cries out. "A drug addict and a tool. You know what happened that day at the Spencer estate."

"I died," she said.

_He's a traitor to all of humanity-_

He leans into her ear. "Let me _enlighten _you, Jill. You are still dead. Make no mistake."

He leans out and looks pleased with himself. Jill feels her heart beating. She dreads to clarify his meeting, and yet she must know.

_It was only an ancillary enzyme. Without it, her body would have succumbed to necrosis…. As for the vaccination, a hardy variant of same virus was administered. You might call the products zombies; others might call them miracles. _

It all comes back to her so suddenly that she draws back and breathes in hard. Time has slowed to a trickle. She meets his eyes, but they are obscured and impossible to read it.

She says it, flat as the realization.

"I'm dying. Without the P30. I'm dying."

"Yes. Do you see now? It is all that keeps you alive."

_This is how you wanted to go,_ she tells herself, _fighting. _And yet she can't make herself move. She can't even blink. Her body sits there, stewing in poison, rotting by the moment. Her hands shake. Her hands, her legs, her tongue, her eyes – they're all dead, moving only because of his will.

_A thrall. _That's what she is.

And then, before the P30 can stop her: "You should have died that day, too."

He laughs again and ignores her.

_A god can't die. _

_But - _

His words to Excella: _You have doomed me. _The BSAA killed a god that day.

Wesker is just a man, and he is dying, too.

He's driving again, starting at a low pace and getting faster and faster until the speed is dangerous.

Jill reaches into the bag. He grabs for her wrist, but she shakes it off. She squeezes a vial of P30 in her hand; it snaps. Shards of glass prick her fist. She only clenches it tighter.

Still, he doesn't understand.

"Your loss," he says, almost chuckling. A gentleman's joke at the expense of some poor animal. "I can make more of the P30 when we reach the Italian labs, Jill. You are not unbound by any means."

"No," she says, "you don't get it."

There is no time to think.

She claws for his face. His glasses fall to his lap and she reaches for his left socket, working to break nail through skin. She has the advantage of surprise and disbelief and his belief that, deep down, she is weaker than he is.

He roars out at her to stop.

It is the loudest she has ever heard him scream.

But she fights against it and her fingers are in his eye. Slimy and she can't dwell on it – a sick pop (_pull it out like a weed, at the roots) _and he bellows like a wild animal. Now he's sightless and she has the advantage if she wants to run. But she doesn't'.

She's Jill Valentine, and Jill Valentine always finishes what she begins.

He bends slightly, but otherwise his fingers are a vice around her arm, hardly acknowledging the blood fountaining from his eye. His blue, glass eye stares lifelessly back at her.

Jill reaches into his coat, wriggling against his grasp, drowning out his screams, and finds the Samurai Edge. _He meant for it to kill Chris_, she thinks.

He can hear her fingertips on the metal.

He knows her touch like she knows her heartbeat.

His voice is a beautiful rumble.

"_Jill," _he hisses, _"do not do this."_

She ignores him. The P30 pounds in her ears; it's that pound which animates her hollow-drum body.

_Can you hurt someone?_

"_Jill-"_

She pulls the trigger. Again and again and again, until, after all the things she's seen, she still has to stumble out of the car to puke. Once and then again, then wiping her mouth. Her vision is white – _snow in Africa. _She slumps against the car. _I must be dehydrated. _

She tries not to think of the gored mess that is his head, of the blood splattered on the dashboard, stained in the seats, in her clothes.

Most of all, she tries not to remember that his last word was her name.

* * *

><p>They find her lying out in the sun like a piece of carrion, blood caked brown on her lip. The sun is high in the afternoon sky, glinting dangerously hot off the car. Waves of heat undulate from the ground. Jill's slumped body casts no shadow.<p>

When they get close, a vulture takes wing. Others circle overhead.

Chris is the first to jump out of the Jeep, rushing toward her like a bullet. His new partner bounds after him only seconds later. They lean over her and shake her awake. Her fish-pale skin has burned.

"Jill... Jill..."

Sheva looks over at her partner and finds that he is, for the second time this week, on the verge of can hear flies buzzing around her, the whiff of something going bad. She turns to the car and her eyes widen.

"_Jill Valentine_-"

The body stirs.

"Chris," Sheva can barely form words, but now is not the time to tell Chris about what is in the car. "Pick her up."

Chris sees the sense in this and he does, bridal style. Gently. She looks so small in his arms that Sheva can't that this woman _bit _her.

Chris lays a hand on her forehead as though checking for fever. He sweeps her bangs out of her face and searches for movement.

"She's alive," Chris says, and his relief is palpable.

Chris reaches for his bottle and dribbles water into Jill Valentine's mouth. Her lips move, but she does not drink. Her eyes flutter open.

They flicker like faulty lights.

"Let's get her into some air conditioning," Sheva says. "Shade, at the very least." Or, best of all, back to the new headquarters. Sheva did not think she could forgive Jill Valentine for what she did to the BSAA, but what she sees in the Jeep convinces her otherwise.

There would be the drug for her there. Sheva knew that for certain. A modified version, of course, designed to stabilize Valentine without provoking violence.

Sheva can forgive Jill Valentine, but she cannot help but be frightened by her, as well.

"Jill? You there? You remember me? Chris Redfield. Your partner."

Jill only blinks. Chris turns away, discouraged, and notices for the first time what the other agents are all staring at.

"Is that..."

There's blood splattered on the windshield and dried all over the seats. Chris stares, transfixed. Sheva cannot begin to imagine what it must be like for him, seeing his sworn enemy reduced to pulp.

He stares for a long time.

The woman in his arms clutches at his shirt and whispers something, something that Sheva barely catches.

She looks at Chris.

"Did she-"

"Nothing," Chris says adamantly.

Sheva heard something. A name.

It just wasn't Chris's.

"Let's go."

Chris heads back toward the van and Sheva follows, watching his broad back, the way his shoulders tense around the woman he carries.

"_Fix me," _Jill murmurs, "_Please."_

Chris only holds Jill tighter, as though to remind her of a kinder world. If there is any other face for love, Sheva has yet to see it.

Sheva glances back at the car. She can see the mess that was once Albert Wesker there, still and lifeless. His hands, his body, are perfectly formed. In the mess of his head is a glimmer. Sheva's brow knits. A jewel, maybe? Glass?

She gives up trying to figure it out and hops into the car.

* * *

><p><em>"How cold it is here!" said he. "How empty and cold!"<em>

Hans Christen Anderson, "The Snow Queen"


End file.
